My brother knows me well. This morning he gave me two interesting nuggets.

The first covers a topic that has been running useless circles around my head since I first started working with advertisers: the relationship (and potential relationship) between true creativity and commercial agenda (perhaps they can can be symbiotic, after all?) Interesting so far. I hope it’s enlightening.

I also received this one.

The former is a commentary on how to salvage creativity and convey a message while working as a commercial artist. The latter suggests bypassing commercial agenda and conveying a message any way you wish. Hmm…

I was impressed with these two artists ability to use shape and negative space to create vivid portrayals of misogyny, racism, and violence. Mini-narratives lay everywhere, in text, in image, and sometimes in texture, hidden under a monochrome layer of paint. These paintings and objects were beautifully tied together with videos by Walker using silhouette puppets, paper sculptures, and other media. This exhibit was aesthetically and conceptually intricate and provocative.

“Exploring vocabulary of the romantic sublime, including paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, and informed by the artist’s own climb up to the 22,800 foot summit of Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, high altitude features breathtaking panoramas. Picturing spaces in society driven by networked financial data, these virtual landscapes are a meditation on the global market structure, its sophistication, and vulnerability.” (from press release)